The Internet Is Flooded With AI-generated Photos And They're Getting Harder To Spot.

Just wanted to remind you guys that there is this app called "No Thanks" that you can use to scan the barcode or look up the brand of a product to check if they are on the BDS boycott list!

play.google.com

No Thanks - Apps on Google Play

Scan barcodes & search serial numbers

A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways. 

The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless—dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth. MIT Technology Review got an exclusive preview of the research, which has been submitted for peer review at computer security conference Usenix.   

AI companies such as OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Stability AI are facing a slew of lawsuits from artists who claim that their copyrighted material and personal information was scraped without consent or compensation. Ben Zhao, a professor at the University of Chicago, who led the team that created Nightshade, says the hope is that it will help tip the power balance back from AI companies towards artists, by creating a powerful deterrent against disrespecting artists’ copyright and intellectual property. Meta, Google, Stability AI, and OpenAI did not respond to MIT Technology Review’s request for comment on how they might respond. 

Zhao’s team also developed Glaze, a tool that allows artists to “mask” their own personal style to prevent it from being scraped by AI companies. It works in a similar way to Nightshade: by changing the pixels of images in subtle ways that are invisible to the human eye but manipulate machine-learning models to interpret the image as something different from what it actually shows. 

Continue reading article here

As someone that has grown up surrounded by beaches and done surf life saving, I know how the sea works. Lots of people dont. Every summer multiple tourists die here because they don’t respect the sea, if you’re going to the coast, here’s a thing I saw on Facebook.

BDS added this section to their boycott page and I think people really need to read it:

please remember, pushing unorganized boycotts without carefully fact-checking every company in the list can be actively HARMFUL to the boycott movement.

BOOST!

In Brazil, this couple planted 2 million trees in 18 years, returning 172 bird species, 33 mammals, 15 amphibians, 15 reptiles and 293 plant species to the area.

The whole world should know them. This is Lélia Wanick and Sebastião Salgado.

The couple decided to start the Terra Institute, a small organization that planted 2 million plants and revived the forest.

"There is only one creature that can convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, and that is a tree. We need to replant the forests."

Using only local plants, the couple rebuilt the entire ecosystem from scratch and the area flourished significantly, allowing the fauna to return; thanks to their work, Lélia and Sebastião saved dozens of endangered species.

"The earth was sad as I was, everything was destroyed. Then my wife got a fantastic idea to replant this forest: all the insects, fish and birds returned, and thanks to the new growth of the trees I was born again."